[ RadSafe ] RE: The hot and cold of history & journalisticcre dibility

[ROGERS, Brent]

Gary

I was a teenager in the 70s, so it's quite possible that I didn't really
have my ear to the ground on such scientific matters, but with that
qualification, I can tell you I never heard of the "Global Cooling
Consensus" of which you quote.

I reckon there's probably not too many teenagers these days that aren't
familiar with climate change, aka Global Warming.

That said, I don't really have a dog in this fight, because it's not a
branch of science that I study or have studied.  What I am saying is that
you'd have to disregard the opinions of a whole lot of dedicated scientists
who are experts in their field to claim humans aren't at least partially
responsible for Global Warning.  As opposed to the handful of anti-nuclear
scientists who seem to have a difficult time getting published in reputable
scholarly journals.  (Most wouldn't get published at all, if they didn't
peer-review each others papers).  That original analogy stating that the two
groups were similar was the one that I found perplexing.

Regards

Brent Rogers
Leader Commercial Radiation Safety Group
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
PMB 1, Menai NSW 2234
T 61 2 9717 3251
F 61 2 9717 9266
M 0417 231 879
E brent.rogers at ansto.gov.au 
www.ansto.gov.au
 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Prestwich" <prestwic at mcmaster.ca>
To: "Gary Damschen" <gary at pageturners.com>
Cc: <radsafe at radlab.nl>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] RE: The hot and cold of history & 
journalisticcredibility
>
> Gary Damschen wrote:
>
>> If the science behind anthropomorphic contributions to Global Warming is 
>> so
>> settled, then could someone explain what seems to be a growing number of
>> articles similar to this one?
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm
>>
>>
>>
>> I also wonder why we are continuing to insist on taking drastic action to
>> forestall the doom and gloom scenarios predicted by computer models when 
>> the
>> models' predictions about the effects of warming apparently do not even 
>> come
>> close to approximating the effects contemporaneously recorded during 
>> earlier
>> known warming periods. Isn't this a bit like the old jokes/stories about
>> people getting million dollar phone bills and being told they had to pay,
>> even though they couldn't possibly have run up such a large bill by
>> themselves, "because the computer said so?" Since when does science 
>> discount
>> the observation of physical phenomena in favor of computer models when
>> checking hypotheses? It seems like almost anyone could postulate a
>> hypothesis, develop a computer simulation based on the hypothesis, then 
>> show
>> the results of the simulation as "proof" that the hypothesis is correct.
>>
>>
>>
>> As far as the "scientific consensus" argument goes, the above article's
>> author makes an excellent point about the "Global Cooling" consensus in 
>> the
>> 70's and 80's. Other great consensus views include the invalidity of 
>> plate
>> techtonics, the flatness of the Earth, the rotation of the Sun around the
>> Earth, the immutability of the atom, and the ferocity and magnitude of 
>> the
>> 2006 hurricane season predicted by.the computer models. If we had 
>> followed
>> the urgent advice during the cooling scare to melt/nuke the ice caps to
>> prevent a new Ice Age, where would we be now? The alarmists of that day
>> decried the immorality of inaction to halt the cooling much as the 
>> current
>> alarmists decry inaction to halt the warming. Perhaps we need to do real
>> observational science and work on refining our models so that they
>> reasonably approximate observed physical phenomena before we insist on
>> potentially ruinous actions that may well be counterproductive based on
>> predictions from those models. I mean, really, isn't this somewhat akin 
>> to
>> demanding immediate action to counter the "radiological threat" posed by 
>> the
>> increase of background counts from 40cpm to 60cpm over 2 seconds and
>> extrapolating that rise for the next 5 minutes? If the average background
>> over 30 minutes is 50cpm, might this be within the normal variance? Is it

>> so
>> impossible that we might be seeing natural fluctuations? As with 
>> radiation,
>> I wonder if there is not a large difference between "detectable" and
>> "hazardous" in climatology.
>>
>>
>>
>> My $0.02,
>>
>> Gary Damschen
>>
>>
>>
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